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Barence writes "Asus is accidentally shipping software crackers and confidential documents on the recovery DVDs that come with its laptops. The startling discovery was made by a PC Pro reader whose antivirus software was triggered by a key cracker for the WinRAR compression software, which was located on the recovery DVD for his Asus laptop. Along with the key cracker the disc also contained confidential Asus documents including a PowerPoint presentation that details 'major problems' identified by the company, including application compatibility issues. The UK reader is not alone, either — several users in the US and Australia have also found suspicious files on Asus discs."

Your HR guy is full of shit. Pretty much every state in the southeast is at-will. It's how they sell themselves to companies (along with a lot of anti-union laws). It's no accident that Wal-mart came out of the South.

> Was it not Windows XP, before any service packs, which came with a file in the 'My Videos' which, when opened in a text editor,> showed the cracked software version used to create it?

This was apparently surprising only to people who don't work for companies that actually make it easy for developers to BUY software without having to get approval up the management chain all the way up to god himself. Half the software my co-workers and I use ends up being pirated, because our company makes it damn near impossible to buy anything that's not on the list of officially-sanctioned software (almost all of which is stuff that the "business" users need). I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter. Of course, if we're 5 weeks into the current quarter, and I need the damn app TODAY (or at least by next week)... well... time to visit astalavista.box.sk (under vmware, of course) to get the crack and run the app (also under vmware, with write access to nothing besides a usb thumbdrive, of course).

Personally, I think 99% of free software's appeal to people who work for big, oblivious corporations is the fact that it's not just free as in beer or liberty... it's also free of bureaucratic grief.

Getting back to the Microsoft example... name any app produced by Microsoft that does something remotely close to what SoundForge does. Um, none? OK, now picture the hapless employee, who works for the largest software company on earth, dealing with THEIR bureaucracy trying to get permission to buy a program sold by one of their "competitors", even though it's a niche they don't actually compete in. Especially with a looming deadline.

Or, alternatively... picture Microsoft hiring an outside consultant/musician to do the track. To save money, they hired a freelancer who's just getting started and doesn't quite do it as his/her "real" job yet. The individual hasn't gotten to the point yet where he/she's making enough money off of it for buying it to be a no-brainer (It IS usually one of the first 3 apps anyone who becomes halfway serious about music production ends up buying when "the time comes"), and the employees at the Microsoft end responsible for getting it on the disc were themselves under immense deadline pressure. The file played, normal users aren't going to view it in a hex editor looking for anything "funny", so on the disc it went.

I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter.

We are only allowed to make purchases once a year. I simply make my request, they go on a capital list, we have a department meet and discuss why, then it is sent up for approval and i get my software.

I just make sure to plan for the year. It's not too hard. I know what my job is and I keep a good eye on what tools are out there to make it better/easier. Sure I can't have the latest Adobe product the day it launches, but I can get it the next capital cycle.

Why do people like you crawl out of the woodwork, just to inform actual useful people, that you don't have an issue with X?

You certainly would have an issue with that policy, if you did anything complex enough to require you to do something you didn't plan last year. All you're doing is making yourself look like someone who doesn't actually do anything, or who always does exactly the same thing.

I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter.

I don't think asus will get sued by winrar. This is obviously an accident, and im sure asus has purchased legal copies, or atleast they have now.
Now they might get sued by Microsoft for violating the nda.

7zip [7-zip.org] supports rar, arj, zip, 7z, cab, iso, etc. etc., and it is a free program, unlike winRAR or WinZip. And it works very nicely.

This is only partially true. 7zip supports 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR fully. The other formats are "unzip" only. So no-go if you need to compress with RAR (the original thread). Too bad because RAR is amazing on database backups. I often get 90% + compression on multigig SQL server backups - much higher than zip or built in compression in backup utilities.

Nice, I want a copy of that. Sounds like Asus is including some pretty useful utilities along with their new machines! Now there's a software bundle that for once might actually be of some use to me!;)

7zip is not superior. It's incredibly slow. I've tried 7zip many times over the past couple of years, hoping it to finally be a superior product to the needlessly expensive WinRAR ($35!), but it never happens.

Uncompressing a file in WinRAR consistently takes up to or over 10x as long to uncompress in 7zip. Try it yourself. WinRAR is even faster with.7z archives.

I tested both products with WinXP x86, Vista Ultimate x86, and Vista Ultimate x64, all on the same 7200RPM SATA2 HDD.

tbf it is slightly slower, not 10x though. and why the fuck are you looking for speed for uncompressing something like a rar file? there are much better formats for fast compression decompression and apparently.7zip is better for flat out compression too.

It is definitely not slightly slower. For me, in my isolated but multiple tests, 7Zip was obscenely slow. I tried on many OSes on 2 PCs and the results were very similar. Your mileage may vary. Me, I won't try it again until the next major version.

Uncompressing a file in WinRAR consistently takes up to or over 10x as long to uncompress in 7zip. Try it yourself. WinRAR is even faster with.7z archives.

So you are saying a file that takes 10 seconds in winrar could take upto 1m40s in 7zip? Or a file that takes 1 minute in winrar could take up to 10 minutes in 7zip?

Please, at least give a believable factor.. yes you said "up to", but seriously in general is it even twice as slow? I doubt it. From my experience, no it's not and the time I save not clicking a nag banner makes it faster.

If winrar is so superior to other zip software then why don't they advertise benchmarks? Seems like a great selling fe

Yes, in my tests it looked like it was going to take WELL over 10x as long to uncompress the same file in 7Zip. I can't say for certain because I took 7Zip's word for it when its estimate told me it would take about 33 hours to unzip a file that literally took 15 minutes in WinRAR.

It's entirely possible that I used the product wrong or that there was a problem on both the PCs I tried, but if this was true then I'd rather use WinRAR simply because it worked better out of the box with no additional config

P.s., I waited about 10 minutes before cancelling that 33 hour uncompress, just in case the estimate adjusted itself. It didn't.
P.p.s., rarlabs.com doesn't have much of a website at all, never mind marketing. Perhaps their excellent (but very overpriced) product speaks for itself.

Some FUD on/., who'd have thought:-) (not you though, some other posters say different things in reply to you).

So, I thought I'd dl 7zipo and give it a whirl, then used the context menus to compress a few directories in the utility's native format (ie rar v 7z, 'cos I only care about the end-result not the format)

Try it yourself. I can only speak for my experience using 3 OSes on my own computer, and one OS on someone else's computer. The results were consistent for me but I hope they're better for everyone else and that I simply used it wrong.

I'm not exaggerating when I state this 10x delay. I'm probably understating. The bigger the file, the longer it takes. A RAR file that took 15 minutes to unzip in WinRAR would have literally taken a day and a half in 7Zip - and that was with a quad core Intel CPU on a 64-bit OS, unzipping from one physical HDD to another.

How the cracking software got onto the restore DVD as well as why it was even present at Asus in the first place.

I can't imagine why a company like Asus would even "need" to crack software keys when they can, most likely, get it at a discount. I mean, it's not like Asus is a barely-scraping-by company that is unable to afford even simple tools.

Both Taiwan and mainland China, let alone Hong Kong, pirated software is easy to obtain. I'd place my bets on either of...

1. The disc master's computer had this information2. The disc replication (usually china/taiwan) factory had this software, and someone didn't erase their image drive.

I'd put more money on 1 due to the power point file about the company. This would suggest that it was done carelessly or intentionally and a whole lot of QC didn't happen before the disc got put in the box.

Asus is a Taiwanese company. You would be surprised how common pirated software is in Taiwan. If you buy a laptop, you would expect it to come with pirated software... I was surprised when a friend of mine bought an Apple's powerbook (through a third party vendor) and it came with pirated copies vmware, photoshop, etc.

Imagine my surprise when an immediate restart after driver installation off of an asus cd booted my computer into a broken version of freedos. An explanation written 4 years ago of what happened to me is here: http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/211.html

I don't know about anyone else, but I personaly would love to see these powerpoint's and word documents. Just from personal perpective... but of course these document may prevent me from buying any ASUS products.

Several years ago I worked in a very large and respectable company that shall remain unnamed (but whose name rhymes with, say, "Nokia"...) and we just shipped our turnkey system with our software AND with the source code. And the company wasn't (and still isn't, AFAIK, but don't work for them since a long time) an open-source company:o) It was a screwup by the consultant guys in India.

I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often, knowing the level of QC that happens in India and China.

When I first read it, I thought, "Oops! Someone copied the wrong file over"... After I read that some internal documents about key issues in the company were on the disc? That makes it sound like an intentional act... Wonder if we'll hear some news about a developer getting fired/sued/etc....

But also you should note that 7-Zip's native 7z format gets rather better compression than RAR.;)

Not in my experience. Also, 7zip's software is horrid compared to WinRAR. Also, there is a fully functional version of WinRAR available for free. They released it in a 1 day giveaway sometime last year I believe.

Damn right. 7-zip is not only a functional piece of software; even its user interface is good, and it's well integrated with 'doze. I'd say it's at least as good as the best of the for-pay compressors/decompressors, if not better!

My guess would be to get rid of the nag screen? That said,I thought all the PC makers loved to put trialware on the machines to help lower their cost. Someone at Asus needs to have their resume up to date,and I hope Asus has plenty of cash on hand,because this will probably get ugly real fast. Talk about a slam dunk lawsuit.

Does anyone know if the crack is carrying a trojan? The fact that it is setting off virus scanners tells me that it might,which means if it was used on the original Asus install image there is a lot of infected machines out there. Of course simply having a folder called cracks on the CD is bad enough,but if it is also trojaned it could be REALLY costly for Asus. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Ha ha,damn that is funny. Of course I'll need to tell that to my 8 year old install of Win2K who is happily running this that it is really infected by undetectable Windows bugs,because it hasn't had a single piece of malware in all these years. Of course I don't click on the dancing bunnies either.

But seriously,as a PC repairman I have seen a lot of users machines infected by these keygens/cracks that turn out to carry either rootkits or trojans. And depending on the site they got it from we are talking

i'm not completely sure, but i believe that anti-virus makers often classify keygens and cracks as viruses. it's a way of posturing to scare the public away from using these programs despite their innocuous nature.

problem is, there are some warez downloads that genuinely do contain trojans/viruses, so if your AV program is set off by a download it's difficult to know if it's a legitimate threat or simply the AV makers trying to manipulate the public.

i imagine a lot of security analysis tools (which can be used for both white hat and black hat purposes) probably set off AV programs as well.

i can see how AV software detecting warez programs might be a useful feature to businesses who want to protect themselves from lawsuits, but it should at least make a distinction between viruses/trojans/malware and warez/hacking programs which aren't harmful to the user's computer. it's not really the place of AV makers to tell users that they can't use a keygen, crack, or security tool. that's not why most people run AV programs.

i'm not completely sure, but i believe that anti-virus makers often classify keygens and cracks as viruses. it's a way of posturing to scare the public away from using these programs despite their innocuous nature.

Unfortunately, a large number of cracks/keygens contain malware. Maybe not from the big groups, but there's so many cracks and keygens out there, that it's hard to really identify which ones are "legit" and which ones work, but will also infect your machine with tons of spyware and adware. The too

Sorry to burst your bubble,but I have actually watched keygens and cracks infect a machine. It is usually either a downloader or one of the W series viruses. From what I've seen working PC repair it isn't the cracking bunches that are infecting the machines,it is the sites that the folks get them from that are wrapping them in trojans and downloaders. But I can verify that it was the actual keygen/cracks,as I used a spare box we used for testing files and filemon and diskmon from system internals. Sure enou

If you read TFA, you will find that this is more than a case of a hard disk someone forgot to erase before selling an old computer.

This time, the wayward data are on a recovery DVD that comes with new ASUS computers, and presumably hundreds or thousands have been shipped. Which makes the following two differences:1) Trying to keep this secret is probably futile, there are too many copies floating around.2) Distributing stuff by accident in this way is an epic, newsworthy blunder. Much worse than forgetting